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We've mentionedseveraltimes over the past two years Wave, Google's ambitiously multi-channel, perhaps plain overwhelming entry in the social media wars. Now, reader mordejai writes "Google stated in its official blog that they will not continue developing Wave as a standalone product. It's sad, because it had a lot of potential to improve communications, but Google never promoted it well, denying it a chance to replace email and other collaboration tools for many uses."

That's because it's chat with a couple of features.
Now, the feature where you can chat in between previous lines of chat is nice and all, but what killed the wave is that starry-eyed marketers got a hold of it and sold it as the new revolution.

Like sharepoint. It's a web framework with some extra features. Or, it's a collection of prebuilt web pages with an SQL backend. But they don't sell it as that. They load it with 200% of Marketese and Weaselish and it can bring you a sandwich. (Just not out of the box).

And that's not counting the sales of SQL and Windows Server CALs that you will need to run it properly. If you study this market carefully (I did) you will see that Sharepoint is the only semi-decent product, and, e.g. Alfresco (which positions itself as the strongest competitor to Sharepoint) is a half-baked, broken piece of crap, with or without the yearly support contract.

Sure it is chat with a couple of features, but it is done in such a way as to make it very unique.Having used Wave in all its current greatness and even more amazing potential I would still state that wave is the future, or at least a program/service that has very similar features is the future.

Sharepoint is Microsoft's implementation of an enterprise content management (ECM [wikipedia.org]) system. You can do much of the same these days with a large number of open-source projects (Alfresco 3.x is great out of the box), most of which work well with each other due to open standards. I bet you're glad you never had to deal with a sucky SP 1.0 implementation in a windows only shop. It may not suck that bad anymore, but it was great to get away from th

Every drooling tech blog proclaimed Wave to be a historic achievement of mankind, reciting the history of email at the beginning of every article to drive home the point that Wave is as historic as the introduction of email itself. I questioned its viability back then and was modded down on Slashdot. Yet here we are witnessing its cancellation despite enormous levels of hype from Google-friendly outlets. With Wave's cancellation and the bundled crapware from carriers on Android p

Only in the sense that a car is a horse with a couple of features, otherwise, youre just wrong. Among its "couple of features" (unashamedly pulled from an earlier post, as it seems this, like so many myths, persist...)

All server-to-server communication is TLS encrypted and authenticated. All wave origins are verified using digital signatures, so, to quote from wikipedia,

Therefore, a downstream wave provider can verify that the wave provider is not spoofing wavelet operations. It should not be able to falsely claim that a wavelet operation originated from a user on another wave provider or that it was originated in a different context.

Thus, spam really ceases to be an issue

Waves can be embedded. Blog comment sections can be replaced by waves; forum threads by waves. All comments would appear in your inbox. Email cannot even hope to replicate this other than with the clunky-and-annoying "notify me when someone responds" forum setting.

You can easily add people to the discussion. The only way to do so with email is to re-forward the whole chain of emails to them and ask them to reply-all; or to include them in the next reply-all and hope that noone else responds first. This is a pretty glaring flaw of email that Wave fixes.

There are of course a ton of other reasons [slashdot.org] why Wave was more than just "chat with a couple of features", but these were big. Wave had the chance to completely redo how we communicated, freeing people from having to keep track of 10 different IM networks + email + forums + blog comments. All of this was, and is in its current implentation, able to be taken care of from a wave inbox. Spam would have taken a hit, as would phishing, because you wouldnt be able to forge "accountservices@capitolone.com". Email chains would have ceased to be a gigantic disaster of people forwarding, reforwarding, editing, reforwarding, and generally mucking up inboxes with garbage. Most importantly, a portable interface could have been crafted around all this, practically for free-- dont need a custom client for each feature, just a client for wave.

Its a little disheartening to see so many people (even techies) who dismissed it out of hand given how much better it was (with no disadvantages that I can discern). I understand why, sort of, since it really wasnt explained at all, and it took me several hours of screwing with to figure out just what it was, and could do. But one would hope the prevailing attitude on slashdot would be "that looks interesting, lets test it and find out if its any good" rather than "that looks complicated, im going to stick with what I know because this scares me".

I mean, if its taking this long to get IPv6 rolled out, and this just failed to take off, what hope have we of ever being rid of rickety old SMTP? Do we just need to keep extending the thing to death until its major flaws are fixed (if thats even possible)? Are we to be stuck fiddling around with seperate interfaces for every form of communication we use (IM, IRC, email, messageboards, comments) for the forseeable future?

Finally, given the above, how can people POSSIBLY be responding "and nothing of value was lost" in an honest to goodness impressive attempt that was completely opened to the public (source for the servers was released!)? Is everyone really that in love with MS Exchange?

Finally, given the above, how can people POSSIBLY be responding "and nothing of value was lost" in an honest to goodness impressive attempt

Because most of your 'above' is either irrelevant or very selective comparing of features to existing systems.

Its a little disheartening to see so many people (even techies) who dismissed it out of hand given how much better it was (with no disadvantages that I can discern).

Other than being slow as hell, clunky as hell, counterintuitive as hell, having a crap UI, and not behaving in any way resembling the systems it was meant to replace - no, it didn't have any disadvantages.

But one would hope the prevailing attitude on slashdot would be "that looks interesting, lets test it and find out if its any good"

Well, the cool thing is is exactly the attitude Slashdot took - and when they got a chance to test it, they found that not only did it not live up to it's hype, it wasn't any good (at least not in the "dessert wax and a floor topping" sense Google kept insisting on). It simply didn't work beyond being a cool collaborative editing tool - and wiki's do that far better.

All server-to-server communication is TLS encrypted and authenticated. All wave origins are verified using digital signatures, so, to quote from wikipedia,

Therefore, a downstream wave provider can verify that the wave provider is not spoofing wavelet operations. It should not be able to falsely claim that a wavelet operation originated from a user on another wave provider or that it was originated in a different context.

Thus, spam really ceases to be an issue

DomainKeys does similar things for e-mail.

Waves can be embedded. Blog comment sections can be replaced by waves; forum threads by waves. All comments would appear in your inbox. Email cannot even hope to replicate this other than with the clunky-and-annoying "notify me when someone responds" forum setting.

First, I might not want all this integrated into my e-mail inbox. Second, Facebook (and probably OpenSocial, Google's other thing) does this - integrating forums, discussions, comments, likes into posts, which are arguably wave-like.

You can easily add people to the discussion. The only way to do so with email is to re-forward the whole chain of emails to them and ask them to reply-all; or to include them in the next reply-all and hope that noone else responds first. This is a pretty glaring flaw of email that Wave fixes.

I'll argue it's much easier to scan through an e-mail thread than do a playback on a wave. Real-time playback is cute but I don't have time for it. And reading the wave linearly doesn't help since people can modify things in between.

There are of course a ton of other reasons [slashdot.org] why Wave was more than just "chat with a couple of features", but these were big. Wave had the chance to completely redo how we communicated, freeing people from having to keep track of 10 different IM networks + email + forums + blog comments.

Google couldn't even integrate GMail with wave. One of the main reasons I gave up Wave was having to keep track of two Google inboxes.

Its a little disheartening to see so many people (even techies) who dismissed it out of hand given how much better it was (with no disadvantages that I can discern).

I don't think people dismissed it out of hand. When it first came out, people lined up for accounts. It just didn't offer anything much in addition to what we had.

Finally, given the above, how can people POSSIBLY be responding "and nothing of value was lost" in an honest to goodness impressive attempt that was completely opened to the public (source for the servers was released!)? Is everyone really that in love with MS Exchange?

Maybe nothing of value was lost precisely because everything has been opened up anyway? Anyone who wants another shot at convincing people that this is a Good Thing(tm), can quite easily do so. I agree that there was phenomenal engineering involved and that may well be used in many scenarios.

The problem probably with wave is that there was no community behind it. Widget could be developed with some pain. But the entire frontend stack was not available to experiment with. It is also sad that the development of the eJabberd guys (Process One) never was launched as Wave server alternative. Personally I found the demo's more impressive than my own experiences with it. But the experiences I did have, were good.

And performance was a bit sketchy too. But most of all, it didn't have a clear 30-seconds or less explanation on what exactly it should be used to, and be better at it than email/IM.So, wow factor was there, but users got bored, and went back to the regular bulletin boards. Where it's not that important to see that someone is typing right now, everything is more or less static and easy to understand.

I suppose online support could use it to communicate with customers, but then it'd need some heavy tweaking...

They should have marketed it as a niche product for scrum/agile development teams with remote members to do collaboration and sprint planning and such. Our team found it very useful for that (as we found Etherpad before it). Problem is, with those two products now gone, what do we use for real-time collaboration and planning? Email cannot cut it, and neither chan "chat". This is seriously going to suck unless we can find a decent (free) tool to replace it.

They did not realize that today everyone has a favorite mean of communication, wether it's email, im, twitter, whatever. Wave was not integrated with anything.

Until fairly recently there was no mail notification, no twitter update, nothing that would allow you to know that something happened in wave. I got invited to waves and found out weeks or months later as I connected by chance to have a look at something else that someone had tried to talk to me.

But most of all, it didn't have a clear 30-seconds or less explanation on what exactly it should be used to

They should have just said:

It is a wysiwyg, distributed, real-time, personal, sharable wiki, with a few extra features that any good wiki could use including tracking conversation threads, subscribing to updates for a page, notifying friends of pages you think they'd be interested in, and easy user access control. In detail:

First and foremost it is a wiki: it is easy to edit a page, it is easy to collaboratively edit, pages are persistent, you can view the history of a page.

It is (in theory) distributed: you can control and host your own content and it still inter-operates with the rest of the "wave-scape".

It is real-time: you can use it as a chat for quick back and forth.

It is personal: you can put whatever you want on it. No limits on topics and no fighting over page namespace.

It is sharable: you can write pages that only you can see, share them with a few friends, or even the whole world. It is up to you.

It does threaded conversation: most wiki's have a "talk" or "discuss" page, but don't really support threaded conversation. User's have developed conventions to get around this (like text nesting levels), but how they don't have to work around it. It is built in.

Ok, maybe that was more than 30 seconds, but you get the idea. When I thought of it as "chat" or "e-mail" it didn't make sense, because I already have perfectly good chat and e-mail. What I don't have is a wiki where I can put my private notes or share my designs with colleges to let them update/fix/annotate them.

It is a shame Google is giving up on it. Fortunately if you drop the distributed aspect (which I think got Wave bogged down in technical details), it shouldn't be too hard to clone the ideas there. For that matter, with just a few tweaks it could even be a Facebook killer. After all, being "wysiwyg, real-time, personal, sharable" isn't too far from being "social". (I mean "social" in the sense of Facebook, not just "social" in the sense of collaborative content creation.) Google came this close to inventing the "social wiki". Now I guess it is up to us.

Wave was somewhere between IM, email, forums, and The Wall. It never made much sense to me - it was kinda like asking me to cook dinner Swiss Army Knife - yeah, I can open wine, cut the meat, saw open the bread, and, well, do something with a screwdriver, but the specialized tools are much better suited for each task.

Maybe some folks did find value in it, but it seemed that the easiest thing to do on Wave was to talk about ways that Wave was theoretically good for doing stuff. And then I'd end up going and doing that stuff with the tools I'd been using to do that stuff up until now with, anyway. Either way, a product with as significant an identity crisis as Wave had from the get go isn't meant for greatness.

Agreed, I don't use it much for my personal life but I used it loads at work for communication amongst team mates. It was very easy to communicate and get a clear break down of conversations and I do believe something similar will pop up in the future.

Once my team and I 'bought in' to using it, it became a marvelous tool.

Almost everything works well if everyone involved "buys in". Technical history (and politics, religion, hobbies, etc.) is littered with cult followings that coalesced around one thing or another that failed to catch on with the general public.

Success depends on either everyone buying in, which almost never happens, OR cases where the product/service works well for its users without everyone else having to use it. Email and the web are rare examples of the former; the enormous variety of mail clients and web browsers are examples of latter.

But ahead of it's time. Like handing someone from 1980 a smart phone.

The overwhelming majority of the public doesn't have smart phones and isn't terribly interested in them. But they are wildly successful in their niche precisely because you can have an iPhone and still call your grandmother's rotary dial land line phone.

Perhaps you don't remember 1980 as well as you think. Seriously, you wouldn't have been impressed in 1980 if I were to tell you that pretty much everybody would have their own personal phone number, and be able to use it anywhere? That the same device would act as a personal music collection with enough cassette tapes and records stuffed in there to fill several refrigerators, with fantastic audio quality? And that you could touch a couple of buttons and get just about any music in the world in a few seconds? And that record stores as we know them, would essentially cease to exist as a result of this game changing technology?

And games. Seriously the lowliest game on a phone today pretty much blows Atari 2600 out of the water. Oh plus they're multi player now over the net.

In 1980, if I wanted to send an email, I used CompuServe for $5/hr to connect on a 300 baud modem, and my system wasn't advanced enough to compose it online. And I was pretty advanced-- nearly nobody else around at the time had even heard of email.

Also you used to have to read a manual to be able to use pretty much any piece of software. The whole idea of an intuitive GUI that you could figure out how to use by just looking at it didn't really exist yet.

If you wouldn't be impressed in 1980 with the state of computers today, perhaps you don't remember 1980 very well. Maybe this list of the top songs of 1980 [musicoutfitters.com] will help you remember 1980 better.

I always thought that their webapp was just a demo of how the protocol works and what it could do. I for one was looking forward to forums such as slashdot changing their backend to Wave. There are so many great communities that have terrible software that could benefit from a robust backend that has all the cool features that Wave has.

It's not clear if the backend aspect of Wave is dead or not, but it kinda seems that way. And that's too bad. I guess the protocol is technically OSS, but it seems unlikely that an installable instance of it will ever come to be.

I thought Wave was great. Yes, it was just a combination of a bunch of other tools that people were using, but there is something to be said for unification of those tools into one cohesive whole. I, for instance, am glad that my phone is also a camera and a calendar. The big problem with Wave was that it was slow and buggy. It would crash constantly and if you had over 50 posts on a wave, it would become unusable. Also, it was hard to get people to know when an update on the Wave was posted. By the time th

We used to use Etherpad for collaborative planning and communication for our (geographically dispersed) scrum/agile team. I liked it better because it had two things that Wave didn't: Line numbers (made it easier to refer to things) and each person contributing had their own text color, so you could see who typed what. But Google bought Etherpad and killed it. So now instead of two possible options, we have zero.

Although Google has said they plan to Open Source the Wave software, there has only been a partial release so far. Can we have the whole thing, please? Of course Open Source is a good way to make sure that some good comes of a discontinued product.

Code dying on the vine is part of the Darwinistic process that maintains the quality of Open Source. If nobody cares about it, nobody will develop it. What I suspect in this case is that there might be a community willing to carry on this project. It's an interesting product.

We used it to run games but it got so overwhelmed we'd have to create new Waves every 50 or so posts. So I'd have a In Character 1, In Character 2, Table Talk 1, GM to Player 1, GM to Player 2, etc... At one point we had 30 or so different Waves.

Once you got usde to it, it as awesome; however it's hard to explain to people why and get them through the learning curve. I suspect there will be something like this used as corporate communication in the future. Man, so freaking awesome.

Even if Wave was a bad idea, perhaps Google should have continued to support it.

Why throw resources into a bottomless pit? Because time and time again it's not the best technology that wins, it's the one that everyone thinks everyone else is using. (Examples (debatable of course): qwerty keyboards, VHS, SQL, windows, C++, XML, javascript)

In the future, Google will unveil other major initiatives and will try to reach critical mass with them. Now that people know Google is willing to abandon a large project so easily, they will be less likely to commit to future Google projects.

So now the projects will actually have to have some merit? Sounds good to me.

Ideally you're right, but often which projects have merit in the long term is a self-fulfilling prophesy. A decision to switch to a platform is a long-term commitment, and necessarily is about what will have "merit" 5 years from now.

Google is up against Apple and its Reality Distortion Field and Microsoft with its 90 thousand employees and its Windows/Office cash cow monopoly. Google must convince people that its platforms will h

So now the projects will actually have to have some merit? Sounds good to me.

Google Wave had tons of merit. But three months out of closed beta just isn't enough time for any new software product to prove itself. None of the big, successful tools you use today would be here if they had been dropped that quickly.

I'll predict that we'll instead see most of Wave's functionality/technology incorporated into gmail, either as a separate panel like Buzz or integrated pop-ups like Google Talk is. It really didn't make sense to have it be a dedicated site, since it made it harder to integrate with one's other activities. I imagine that within a few months Gmail will probably introduce functionality to convert an existing email and/or chat thread into a wave.

It never took off because it was slow, buggy, and unintuitive. I got better frames per second on Team Fortress 2. Entire sites [easiertoun...anwave.com] were made dedicated to how Google Wave made us feel like old people using computers. Initially, Wave didn't even work on Google's own Chrome browser.

Google Wave got plenty of coverage. It didn't take off because it was bad.

On a related note, has anyone tried those collaborative diagramming tools that already exist? I expected (and would've been happy with) a multiplayer version of MS Visio over a real-time forum.

This was a few months ago so perhaps things changed -
1) It was slow and buggy and crashed a lot. It didn't work on internet explorer.
2) You couldn't use it for your ordinary email. It tried to replace it rather then extend it.
3) It was horribly confusing. It tried to do too many things but it wasn't obvious how to do any of them!
But the idea was great. Hopefully something will spring up from it's ashes.

Wave had a lot of cool ideas.The problem was that it was a steaming pile of junk.

Since it was a browser-bound experience which didn't even have good functionality except in Gecko and Webkit it really didn't have all that much going for it.Inefficient interface, really steep system requirements and not enough actually useful stuff to counter the disadvantages.

Also, even without allt the problems it had, it was just another form of communication without any hook to actually use it daily.

Remember, even if a service is technically superior to what it is supposed to be replacing, that alone is definitely not enough, you need something else (if I knew what apart from symptoms I'd be rich beyond imagination).Also, if a service is inferior in speed it means it's a pain to use, and, with the market slowly realizing that you need to accept that there are slow computers on it wave really didn't fit, not only should every form of communication work on a netbook, but these days it even needs to work on a bloody cell phone.

So, yeah, bloatware with few real places where it could be used to good effect doesn't gain critical mass?No big surprise.

... of something like google wave given the ineptitude of the masses is idiotic, something that would replace email/IM is going to take time to build (like on the order of decades). Why are companies trying to get an "instant win"? This lack of effort is disturbing. If it's not adopted immediately an din large numbers it's suddenly niche and a flop?

If you read TFA, is says things like "we want to drive breakthroughs in computer science that dramatically improve our users’ lives" and "we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science."

Earth to Google: a computer scientific achievement does not a user experience make.

Really. It's not that hard. Just becase you can putting together bunch of crazy-ass techno doesn't means people will flock to your door any more than I should be president of the United States if I can solve a Rubuik's cube in under 10 seconds.

Why have a huge announcement and generate the buzz and then not let anyone use it? I signed up the first day after they announced it because I thought it might make a cool tool for my dev team, which tends to be remote most of the time. I didn't hear anything back for a while and then just kind of forgot about it. Part of their user adoption problem might just be the fact they didn't let anyone try it.

Closed beta, plus when you finally found someone with an invite to give you, then you'd still have to wait for a few days for some reason. What did they need those three days for? Were they doing background checks on me? Did they have one stressed out intern entering all the invitees' email addresses into a database? I was excited when one of my buddies offered me the invite, but by the time I actually got to sign up, much of that excitement had already passed.

I was disappointed with Wave. About a year ago I spent a week trying to understand their source code because I wanted to use their data structures as a database and eventually build it into ObjectCloud [objectcloud.com]. Their code was about 20,000 lines that essentially ran a text-based chat with no way to persist the data. I asked twice on their mailing list which interfaces I should plug into to persist the data, but I got no responses.

Basically, they tried to solve too many problems at once. If they just open-sourced a nice way to have concurrent data structures, it might have taken off; but the system for concurrent data structures was too difficult to understand or work with.

Google promoted Wave well, I remember sitting behind some Wave developers at Google shortly before they were going to show it off and they kept saying things like, "when everyone's using Wave..." Well, it takes a long time to build that kind of critical mass!

A friend and I tried using it, mostly as a joke, and one of the first things I discovered was that there was no obvious way to make a table. I know the web is based around format-independent data, but I wish more sites would provide a simple way to do aligned columns. It makes so many things so much easier to read.

Ok, WE did. But the people I tried to get using it for meetings and the like just didn't want to know. They're happy with their voice conferences plus one person presenting a powerpoint over a screen sharing app.

It kind of goes to show how full of shit most tech blogs are. Almost all of them were talking about how Wave was the future, absolutely, after watching one indie youtube video about it explained in cute crayon drawings.

Perhaps there should be a rule for them. Just as with companies using the products they make is called eating their own dog food, blogs who promote someone else's failed product should have to eat their own dog shit.

This is completely Google's fault. Google Wave is a great product as it currently is, but Google completely failed to communicate to people why. But more to the point, Google itself failed miserably to leverage its own idea in the ways the first demo at Google I/O promised. Why can't I integrate gmail with Google Wave? Why after all this time does it still not work on my phone? Why doesn't it work with Google Docs? Why doesn't it work with Google Buzz?

More importantly, why would someone waste so much time, money, and manpower on a product they have no intention of supporting through interoperability with their own product line and through advertising and public exposure? What did they think would happen?

This is yet another huge screwup for Google indicative of their inability to build social networking products. Maybe it's time to sell my Google shares.

They are killing the standalone version, but that dont implies that they wont use/embed/whatever it in other of their existing or future products. Would be great an isolated version of it in google apps for your domain, in buzz or, who knows, something that integrate tools instead of seeing them as separate entities with a common authentication.
Also (some of?) the code is open, another company could deploy/evolve it.

I disagree with your assertion that the effort has been a waste of time. A lot of the ideas and methods that were developed for Wave are already being used in some of their other products. Have you had a look at the real-time collaboration features in Google Documents lately? From TFA:

We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

I have a feeling we will start seeing more and more Wave-like features making there way into other Google products. Also, a lot of the code is already open source.

Google Wave was on track: an odd-ball separate product with a small user community that had the potential to take off in the future. The next logical steps would have been integration with GMail and Google Talk and Google Docs, cleaning up and speeding up the UI, creating a mobile client, extensiblity in App Script etc. In a few years, Google could have had a kick-ass mainstream platform or it could have fizzled. It would still have been a good try.

However, nothing like Wave will ever catch on three months after its first open, public release. It's just not going to happen. And by killing it so quickly, Google has not just killed a nice platform with good potential, they've also seriously damaged trust developers have in them.

Google products end up in two distinct buckets: applications that are designed for the way people work, and applications designed for the way one or two propellerheads at Google work.

Gmail, Search, Maps, Chrome and possibly Android and Picasa fall into the former. Youtube and Postini do as well, even though they're not-invented-here

Apps (as a collaboration system), Wave, Bookmarks, Reader and Bookmarks fall into the latter. ChromeOS might do the same.

Wave's problem is that no one could really explain how to use it in a fashion people could understand: it solved an itch of someone's at Google, but no one was able to effective explain how to use it. I've found out more from reading Slashdot comments about how it could be used than by reviewing any of the material Google provided. That it was kind of glitchy is just icing on the cake. With some effort it could have gained acceptance, but it would have required the propellerheads to try and exhibit some empathy. Wave forced me to say "Ok, now what?" way, way too often.

In Apps it's perversely hard to share documents. You set up a shared workspace; you should be able to upload documents and have everyone see them, except that you can't. You have to explicitly share it with everyone, including users you provision later and it doesn't even show up search results. You can't even tag documents in Apps, despite the sucess of tagging in Gmail and elsewhere. Again, I ended up saying "Ok, now what?" and wondering if Apps developers ever deal with real users. That the thread in Groups about this failing is months old and pages long says everything, really.

Ditto Bookmarks. You should be able to search, tag and sync with Chrome. Except you can't. Reader I've never been able to figure out. I'm pretty sure Video would be in this boat had Google not bought Youtube, because it's still very strange. Buzz might go this route as well; it's a bit early to say.

Compare this to Search, Gmail or Maps, which just work and are used, effortlessly, by millions. Even when features are added, they're usually added in a sane, helpful way. This is where Google falls short, and where Apple usually does not: Apple doesn't, leave the end user hanging and wondering what the hell to try next. It's also a very similar feeling I get from Nokia's offerings: that someone is in love with the technology, but far too arrogant and self-centered to admit to it's failings and/or that the software is developed to scratch one person's itch and left to rot.

It kind of goes to show how full of shit most tech blogs are. Almost all of them were talking about how Wave was the future, absolutely, after watching one indie youtube video about it explained in cute crayon drawings.

You may be hitting the wrong blogs. What I read, coincided with my own opinion: interesting technology, but little advantage over competition, and high complexity, means you won't see mainstream adoption over basics like email.

Of course, maybe I unintentionally looked for blogs to match my own opinion. So.. what were you looking for;) ?

Tech reporting has always been full of shit. In the 70's, when I read "Popular Mechanics/Science," they always had something that was "just few years away." Mostly, the stuff never appeared. In the 80's, we were going to have a "paperless office," real soon. The pervasiveness of computers just enables more folks to print out stuff that they probably will never read anyway. Also in the late 80's Token Ring would eventually replace Ethernet, because it is technically superior. When that didn't occur, des

I used it. Specifically, I used it for hyper rapid content development among small groups of dispersed people. The advantages of simultaneous editing of single documents (along with the edit history) were huge for this particular niche.
The thing is, there aren't many small dispersed groups needing hyper rapid content development. If you weren't as dispersed, or had the time for consecutive (rather than concurrent) editing, other traditional tools were better. The interface, and its tendency to bog down once the wave sizes grew large, didn't help either.
But as I fell into the small niche it was really useful for, rather than just as a novelty, I will miss it.

I really love Google Wave but it was simply too unstable to use very often. Slowdowns and sometimes even crashes were often, either by wave or the browser having problems with it. It's brilliant technology that has a lot of potential in the future, but I don't think it's ready for most production usage yet.

I really love Google Wave but it was simply too unstable to use very often.

I love Google Wave, too, and I've spent countless hours trying to come up with something that I can actually USE Wave for... unfortunately, I come up blank most of the time. It's really fun to play around with, but there's nothing that Wave is really great for except in very specific cases... and in those specific cases, Wave is probably the most useful thing in the world.

Not quite- In wave, when rapidly evolving a text based document, you could tell exactly where other people were working. This meant people could dive into any part of the document that needed work without any additional organization of who was doing what. While google docs synchronizing every few seconds and showing who is editing approaches this, that last step actually makes quite a big difference.
I'd like to see docs color code the paragraph by the active editor, then it would have the same functional

The new Google Docs set up actually shows you exactly where someone is and has almost the same rapid updates as Google Wave. I would guess they are using something similar in Google Docs as they did in Wave.

I used it all the time. Our development team does scrum/agile, and we have some remote team members. We used to use Etherpad for doing collaborative sprint planning, but when Google bought and killed it, folding those developers into Wave development, we were forced onto Wave. It's been useful (though I liked Etherpad better), and now we're in a position of wondering what tool we can use to fill this need.

Use a development model that isn't just a bunch of bullshit buzzwords for a middle-out model? Perhaps use amazing modern technology like the telephone or email, and actually put someone in charge of your project instead of relying on flaky feelgood collaboration? Maybe use a repository like the rest of the software world? Or simply join a rugby club where your agile scrum and collaborative sprint abilities will be rewarded?

Funny, we just started using it for conference calls. With our group distributed, it is really handy to have a private way to communicate during meetings. Has the side effect of keeping all the meeting notes in one spot. I hope it continues to be offered.

I wanted, then I found at that it is currently not possible (or at least awkward via some email hack) to create a public wave, then I went away thinking "I'll try that again when its ready"... Guess that will now never happen, to bad, since it actually looked quite good for development discussions, brainstorming and all that other stuff that isn't quite a mailing list discussion and not quite a wiki either.

I use it to coordinate a web development team. I have a team of four people, all in different towns, collaborating through wave.The graphic designer can drag her work in and have everyone comment.The CSS coder can tell the PHP coder what he needs done, and vice versa.The accesibility adviser can tell us what to change.I can check on progress.

I entirely agree with your sentiment. We've watched over the years Microsoft turn into what they hate (IBM), and now we get to watch Google turn into what they hate (Microsoft). That said, if you want Etherpad on your own server, Etherpad's full open source code [google.com] is available.

I'm not sure Microsoft hated IBM. Some people who used Microsoft products might have hated IBM and projected that emotion onto Microsoft, but I think Microsoft actually wanted to be IBM. Certainly they didn't hesitate to use all of IBMs tactics and enhance them to be even worse.

Would this be the same Etherpad whose wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherpad) reports that Google open-sourced the software (http://github.com/ether/pad) at the end of 2009?

Maybe the same Etherpad whose site lists a dozen or so public servers (http://etherpad.org/etherpadsites.html) which you can use to get access to the software?

Yeah, I can see why you'd be pissed that Google just killed the project and never open-sourced it. Now you can't save your company a bundle of money by installing the open-source version on your servers for free, and your only recourse is to bitch and moan about how awful Google is here on Slashdot. I seriously feel your pain, man. After going through so much effort to see if the software was still available, I can only imagine the crushing disappointment you feel now that you realize the software is gone forever, and you'll never be able to work with Etherpad ever again.

(And FFS, mods, the parent is not insightful, interesting, or even remotely relevant. It's simply bitching by a lazy person who can't be arsed to do a simple web search.)

(And FFS, mods, the parent is not insightful, interesting, or even remotely relevant. It's simply bitching by a lazy person who can't be arsed to do a simple web search.)

Actually, you you might be the uninformed arse here. Last time I tried (and *I* actually tried, not just googled it and then ran my mouth on/.) to install Etherpad it was not a straightforward install, the source was full of hard-coded crap, it lacked many of the features the website had, the docs were bad, and when it finally got up an

Totally agree. We used Etherpad a lot, until we were forced into Wave. Wave was good, but Etherpad had two features we really wanted/liked that Wave lacked: line numbers, and different-text-color-per-user so you could see who typed what.

If they really did believe their "first, do no evil" mantra (which they've been ignoring of late), they would spen Etherpad back off, let it resume operations, so that the need that it filled can be, well, filled again.